I’ve said it many times over the years — music is the most god-awful business in the world. Not the music, the business. Musicians have two major disadvantages going against us: 1) playing music is too damn much fun, and 2) because of #1, too many of us would do it for free. Name another business like that.
The arts in general (especially the performance arts: music, dance and theater) suffer from this. Plumbers don’t feel compelled to plumb, would not do it for free, in fact require very good money to come out and crawl around in your home’s nethers looking for leaks to fix. No bulldozer operator will be found at an intersection holding a sign that reads, “Will move hills for food.” Even when old Don finished his TV ads with his famous tagline, “I don’t want to make any money, folks… I just love to sell guns”, he said it with a wink and a sly look on his face, knowing full-well that everyone was hip to the fact that he was raking in a boatload.
If we musicians can’t get our price, we lower it to ridiculously low levels, and are suckers for ‘good exposure’ gigs. All the hours of practice and rehearsal it requires to learn our instruments, to improve and then maintain our skills, we discount to zero, and book the gig totally on the time it’ll take to do it.
Do doctors actually ‘practice’ an hour or two a day, just to maintain their chops? Nope, once they get the sheepskin, they can be in business for life with only the occasional refresher course. Same with lawyers. But for a musician or a dancer to keep in shape, the athletic aspect of what we do must be diligently maintained, or else we lose our edge. And seldom are these thousands of hours of practice time remunerated in any meaningful way.
But we stupid artists… for us it’s not just a career we train for to make money. No, it’s the center of our being, the very air we breathe, and our egos (or hearts and souls, if you prefer) commands that we do it. And the world reinforces this mental paradigm — it’s a gift we’re given, it tells us, and it would be wrong for us not to use it, no matter the cost.
We’re actually sometimes guilt-tripped into accepting
the status quo because “artists are touched by God”.
Well, we’re “touched”, alright — by God surely, but also by our own unconscious addiction to what it is we do. We consider ourselves so lucky to have “the gift”, to get to do this wonderful thing for which people publicly and unabashedly clamor, applaud, and scream their approval, which feels so good to us, that it becomes a virtual drug we crave, essential to our sense of self, a cornerstone of our identity. And so, in spite of the god-awfulness of the business, in spite of the fact that when examined from a ROI perspective we are taking a bath financially, we nonetheless stay in the game, always hoping for the best.
The most gifted musicians, with good management, can rise to the top, but it’s not a given. As a result of music and art education being defunded in public schools, and with a pronounced devolution of musical sophistication exhibited on the charts year after year, the general quality of music, IMHO, has been degenerating for decades. Formulaic songwriting is now the norm, the “millennial whoop” being a prime example. As mentioned in the linked video, many in recent generations have in fact rebuked today’s music in favor of the harmonic complexity, timbral and lyrical quality of the 1960s. And many of us take our cues from the music of much earlier eras (I mean, JS Bach, for God’s sake… the man was insanely good, and we’re talking music from several centuries ago).
The question for us mere musical mortals who strive to do this for a living then becomes — how do we create more value for our music, receive reasonable compensation for the hours we put in, when we also feel so compelled to crank out the jams and distribute them, despite the increasing devaluation of the art of music? I’ve often thought that I should only do live gigs, but never again release a recording of my playing — but make them anyway, archiving them for my heirs to release after I’m gone. For a few weeks anyway, that seems to be the best time for most artists to finally make good money in the recording side of the music business. When the public realizes the well has literally gone dry, for a brief time they want to stock up on the product. On the other hand, this doesn’t help the artist, as his/her days of financial need have ended.
Of course, some musicians do very well in the biz, luck out and find themselves riding the wave of a perfect storm. I call it the Ringo Effect. Now, I truly love Ringo’s drumming, he’s one of the tastiest rock drummers ever. But sans the Beatles, he would most likely have knocked about the pubs in Liverpool until he wised up and got a law degree or something (I can definitely see Richard Starkey, Esq. on a business card). There are certainly multi-millionaires in this business, but with relatively rare exceptions, most of the time their success has more to do with marketing and hype than skill.
I quite suspect that the world’s greatest musicians are never heard, simply because they find the business of music so distasteful and contrary to the art of music.
Case in point: my paternal grandmother’s first husband was a very gifted visual artist and classical pianist back in the early 20th century. His name was Ira Pember, and in his early years (according to family lore) often performed accompanying the popular singer of the day, Kate Smith. But Ira was by nature reclusive, abhorred the stage, and craved a life of solitude. So he left the music business, left my grandmother and her first child, and traveled from Indiana up into the depths of the Michigan forests, where he bought some land, built himself a two-story log cabin, raised goats, grew a long beard, and spent the rest of his life alone, painting and playing the piano.
It is said his cabin became so full of completed paintings that there was only a pathway through the living room, with canvasses stacked against the walls on all sides. Loggers say on snowy nights, off in the distance they could hear him playing Tchaikovsky into the wee hours.
Did Ira eschew the limelight because he knew in his heart he didn’t have the chops to meet the expectations of a successful classical pianist? Was he terminally shy? Was he inherently antisocial, and/or couldn’t be bothered with the demands of a classical music career? Neither I nor anyone in my family know for sure. But from all reports, there was no question with regards his talents, nor of his dedication to them. I like to think he simply didn’t care for worldly trappings, and was committed to living a quiet, simple life on his own terms, free and unencumbered by the expectations of a business he loathed enough to leave before it consumed him. Ira pursued his art to suit himself, the world be damned.
I have a very early, indistinct memory of Ira from when, as a small child, our family went up to spend some time with him. I recall the front of the cabin, and a somewhat scary image of an old man with a long beard. I don’t recall getting to hear him play, but certainly I would have been too young to appreciate it if I had.
For some mysterious reason (ha), my family has often likened me to Ira Pember, saying that it was amazing that none of his blood ran through my veins (my grandfather was Grandma’s second husband). As a young songwriter, I wrote a song on the banjo for Ira, and many years later recorded it on the CD On With The Show by Stella & Jane featuring Jeff Foster. Goes a little something like this:
Thanks to my friend Tj. Jones for the FB thread that inspired this blog post.
